An iPhone app using mindfulness to quit smoking is about to be tested in clinical trials. It is developed by Judson Brewer, an assistant professor and medical director of the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic at Yale. He also practices mindfulness. In a clinical trial, Brewer found mindfulness training to be twice as effective as Freedom from Smoking, a program to stop smoking offered by the American Lung Association. Brewer’s study, according to Mind and Life organization’s Fall 2013 newsletter, is the first to link mindfulness to the “associative learning process of smoking”. Mindfulness can decouple the link between craving and smoking. The study was published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, December 2011.

We can expect increasingly more yoga, meditation, and mindfulness apps!